Academic Studies of Human Consciousness

Last
update to this website was on: 15 March 2011

Concepts of Consciousness - A Brief Academic History

The earliest substantive study of human consciousness, probably occurred during the
6th Century B.C. This age, referred
to by Will Durant as the "Shower
of Stars," is at the center of the "Axial
Age" as defined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Most
notably, this was the time of the Buddha in India, the philosopher Heraclitus in Ephesus and the
physician-philosopher Alcmaeon
of Croton. These men all taught and thought extensively on topics pertaining to consciousness.
Unfortunately, the Buddha's teachings were strictly oral and, although both Heraclitus
and Alcmaeon wrote books, only fragments have survived in the works of other
Classical Era writers.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest extant
writings on the subject of consciousness, are contained in
some of the early prose Upanishads
(ca. 700-500 B.C.) of ancient India. Subsequently, in 4th Century B.
C. Greece, various aspects of consciousness were addressed in the written dialogues of Plato
(427-347 B.C.) and the works of Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.). During the Hellenistic Age (ca. 330-100 B.C.) which
followed, the views of Plato and Aristotle continued to dominate consciousness
thinking in the Greek speaking
world.

From the 1st Century B.C. to the 5th Century A.D., Europe and the
Near East were under the political hegemony of the Roman Empire. During
this era, Stoicism and Neo-Platonism were the dominant philosophies.
However, in the 5th Century, the Roman Empire in the West collapsed and the
Greco-Roman "Age of Reason" was replaced by a Christian "Age of Faith."
The result, at least in Europe, was an intellectual Dark Age which lasted from the 5th
Century until the time of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th Century.
Virtually no progress in the area of human consciousness study was made in
Christian Europe during this
thousand year period! Philosophical thought, such as it was, was dominated
by the dead hand of Aristotle and the Scholastics. Fortunately, in the 15th Century, a rebirth
of learning occurred and an entirely new set of scientific ideas
ultimately came to replace the inadequate Medieval mindset.

Beginning in the 17th century, European philosophers started to wrestle with the
mysteries of the conscious mind. The serious study of consciousness became
a province of that branch of philosophy usually referred to as metaphysics. The most notable people in this field
included Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), John Locke
(1632-1704), Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716), David Hume (1711-1776), Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel (1770-1831).
The philosophical writings of these people explored the same subjects that
modern-day philosophers, psychologists and scientists still pursue. These
subjects include cognition, perception, language, beliefs, emotions, sensations
of pain and pleasure, awareness of self, sleep, dreaming, and the relationship
of body to mind.

In Europe and America, psychology and brain science began to emerge in the
middle of the
19th Century and consciousness began to be studied in a rational and systematic
manner. The most notable practitioners during this era were the psychologists Wilhelm Wundt
and William James.
Despite this auspicious beginning, the study of human consciousness soon fell
out of fashion and by about 1920 a new Dark Age had descended over consciousness
research.

This occurred primarily due to the rise of psychological
Behaviorism pioneered by people such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Human consciousness
phenomena were considered to be too subjective in nature and not conducive
to experimental analysis. This religious orthodoxy of Behaviorism dominated
psychology from the 1920's to the 1960's. Creative thought about cognitive
phenomena and related topics was smothered.

However, even during this 20th Century Dark Age, work performed primarily by
medical researchers improved our understanding of arousal, sleep, dreaming,
hypnosis, pain, pleasure, sensory perception, and animal consciousness.

While the study of human consciousness was stalled, important
scientific gains were made in other areas of the life sciences, particularly
genetics. In 1944, the Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a science
classic entitled What is Life. This book inspired many scientists
in physics and chemistry to enter the fields of molecular biology and genetics
and led to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. The noted
physicist and computer scientist Eric Baum, who is elsewhere discussed at
this web site, has said:

Schrödinger felt
that life must be explainable by physics and chemistry, yet seemed to violate
the normal behavior of entropy-- and he understood further that this was a
remarkable wedge point to explore. He figured out the explanation: life is the
result of evolution of genetic information, which selects for complex processes
that by ordinary considerations would be very unlikely. He predicted that there
must be a molecule capable of carrying the genetic information (incorrectly
thinking it would be a protein). His beautifully-written book was
influential and timely. Within 4 years,
Von Neumann elucidated the mechanisms
involved in self-reproducing automata (illustrating his abstract discussion with
a picture looking remarkably like DNA to the eyes of readers today); and within
a decade,
Watson and Crick grasped the structure of DNA.

In the late 1950s, psychology began to emerge
from its Behavioral Dark Age into the light of the Cognitive Revolution.
This psychological renaissance occurred largely due to the experimental work of
people such as George A. Miller and
Donald Broadbent, as well as by the writings of the noted
linguistic scientist Noam Chomsky. In 1967, Ulric Neisser's book entitled Cognitive
Psychology, named the new field and effectively outlined its content.
Behaviorism still survived during the 1960s and early 1970s, but only as a
declining intellectual movement that was in its last gasp of popularity. By 1980
the domination of cognitive approaches across almost all areas of psychology
(even animal learning) was virtually complete.

By the late 1980s, advances in neuroimaging,brain mapping, and
the science of artificial intelligence (AI) caused a new generation of
researchers to investigate human consciousness. Recently, new discoveries in human
brain
neuroplasticity have further stimulated consciousness research.
Very recently, neuroscientists have begun to examine Buddhist Meditation
techniques with respect to their affect on neuroplasticity. The end result of
all these new discoveries is that the quantity of research papers in the
consciousness field has enormously increased. Since the mid-1990s, major
universities began to offer reasonably well defined consciousness studies
programs. Professional journals
and societies have been created and academic conferences devoted to
consciousness studies are now being held on a regular basis. In the United States, the
most important are the conferences hosted by the Center for Consciousness at the University
of Arizona in Tucson. These conferences have been held bi-annually since 1994
with the ninth conference scheduled for 13-17 April 2010.

Main Purpose of this Web Site

The noted
neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, in Chapter 1 of his book entitled The
Feeling of What Happens (Published 1999) makes the following statement:

The traditional
worlds of philosophy and psychology have gradually joined forces with the world
of biology and created an odd but productive alliance. For example, by
means of the loose federation of scientific approaches currently known as
cognitive neuroscience, the alliance has permitted new advances in the
understanding of vision, memory and language. There is good reason to
expect that the alliance will assist with the understanding of consciousness as
well.

Consistent with the
above, I have undertaken a
self-imposed project involving the identification and discussion of some of the
ideas of several importantphilosophers, psychologists
and scientists
(four people for each field) concerning both human and machine consciousness.
Most of the individuals selected have performed their most important work within
the last twenty years. The 12 individuals discussed
are listed in the following table:

Disclaimer

This projectis being accomplished mainly as an intellectual
exercise for my own personal amazement and amusement.
Even so, the results of these studies are being made
available to anyone who may have similar interests via this web site. The essays appended to this site only provide
my interpretations of some of the ideas of the individuals cited. In no way
should these interpretations be considered to represent a complete summary of
all of the ideas of these people. The interpretations are entirely my own and I am
solely responsible for any errors, whether objective or subjective, that may be
found.

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